Requiem for Aleppo choreography by Jason Mabana to premiere at Sadler’s Wells

15 February 2017

Newsdesk

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Requiem for Aleppo, a brand new work created and conceived by composer David Cazalet with choreography by Jason Mabana, will premiere at Sadler’s Wells on Sunday 23 April 2017. The night will be introduced by BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson, and all money raised will go to support the work of charities Syria Relief and Techfugees.

The work will contain 12 dancers from across the world. Cazalet’s original music is a combination of Requiem Mass lyrics set to choral music, linked by Arabic poetry from the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, also set to music, and interpolated throughout with the voices of people from Aleppo telling their real-life stories - stories gathered from recent interviews and which have fed into the development of the work.

Techfugees, a social enterprise coordinating the international tech community’s response to the needs of refugees, will live stream the show through its social media channels. Livestreamed screenings of the show will take place in cities where the Aleppo Diaspora has found shelter (screenings are being planned in Cairo, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona…Each of these screenings will be used to raise further funds).

Syria Relief is the largest Syria focused charity registered in the UK. With a solid network of committed management and logistics staff on the ground inside Syria , Syria Relief operate in some of the most hard to reach areas of Syria, including besieged areas.

With this level of expertise on the ground, Syria Relief implement humanitarian projects inside Syria in a number of different sector from education, healthcare, livelihood, protection to food security and sponsoring orphans in the most desperate areas. Syria Relief is directly supporting civilians and displaced communities while providing the tools and training to help them become self-sufficient in their altered circumstances. Since their work started in 2011,they have touched the lives of 2 million people distributing more than 75 million dollars work of aid.

David Cazalet said, “I want Requiem for Aleppo to be a reminder, now and ongoing, of the suffering of a people and what the world has lost. It is an appeal to our common humanity - an expression of grief articulated in movement, song and design. It is a refusal to pay silent witness to a humanitarian crisis". Requiem for Aleppo is written in memoriam for the lives that have been lost, destroyed, dislocated and displaced, it is a lament for the destruction of a city of great sophistication, history and tolerance whose loss is humanity’s loss.”